Tripping Around The Triennial

Finally, during the third iteration of the NGV Triennial, I’ve realized that the appreciation of this exhibition is a matter of mindset.  If you go in with an open mind, keen to see what people are getting up to these days then you may be pleasantly surprised.  But be warned - we are living through troubling times so expect to see some troubling work.   The NGV magazine tells us that the Triennial is anchored in three themes; Matter, Magic and Memory.  Nearly 100 works from over 30 countries have been assembled in this exhibition with overtones encompassing race relations, climate crisis, AI and war.

Julian Charriere, And beneath it all flows liquid fire  (NGV)

Australian Design Review tells us that the theme of ‘magic’ represents the influence of spirituality on constructing an understanding of the world around us, whereas ‘matter’ symbolises how nature and materials shape human culture. The exhibition’s theme of ‘memory’ will illuminate how the histories of people, places and objects continue to impact our contemporary world.  

As with the Melbourne Now exhibition several months earlier, part of the Triennial has its own dedicated spaces whilst other parts are inserted into the permanent collection. 

For some reason, the thoughts of the late Robert Hughes came to my mind when viewing this exhibition.  “The Age of Anxiety” was the title Hughes gave to the final episode of his 1996 TV series “American Visions”.  We are still living with this anxiety today although the focus has shifted from the aftermath of the disastrous Vietnam War to climate change, the loss of habitat and species and the realization that our natural resources are not infinite.  Apparently it’s the intention of many artists participating in the Triennial to address these issues.

Ashley Jameson Eriksmoen, ‘Fell’,  timber salvaged from furniture (Geoff Harrison)

The work “Fell” clearly has environmental and sustainability overtones, but visually it’s stunning.  Eriksmoen is a designer/artist who has won a number of awards including for furniture design.

Tracey Emin,  'Love Poem For CF', 2007  (NGV)

Robert Hughes had real issues with what he regarded as preachy, single issue ‘art’ where “victim credentials can account for more than aesthetic achievement”.  So true, and this came to my mind whilst viewing this work my Tracey Emin - and it’s a recent NGV acquisition.

Agnieszka Pilat, 'Hetrobota 2023' (Geoff Harrison)

Pilat trained these Boston Dynamics robot dogs to behave in distinctly different ways.  Basia is the oldest, the most serious and the introvert; Bunny is the narcissist and the artist while Vanya is the protector, monitoring what’s going on. What freaks me out is the thought that in a few years time we will look back at this work and think how primitive it was, given the relentless advances in technology towards - who knows where?

SMACK, 'Speculum'  (Youtube)

This is meant to be a digital remake of Hieronymus Bosch’s renaissance masterpiece “Garden of Earthly Delights” where ‘the banal temptations of modernity, consumerism and the obsession with technology take the place of the Devil’s apple offered to Adam and Eve, which led to their downfall.’  As a friend pointed out, there is no sex and gore in this remake - I wonder why?

Franziska Furter, 'Liquid Skies/Gywrynt' & 'Haku', climate carpet and glass beads (Artshub)

The carpet depicts multiple satellite images of storms with a shower of glass beads overhead.  This installation is cleverly juxtaposed against wild seascapes painted by J W M Turner and others.  Furter draws constant inspiration from the weather for her work.  “It forces me to become aware of what is now.  As a recurring theme, the weather constantly shapes and changes my work as it constantly shapes and changes the world.”  She is a great fan of the BBC’s Shipping Forecast which has been regularly broadcast since 1861.

Flora Yukhnovich, ‘A Taste Of A Poison Paradise’, oil on canvas, 160 x 275 cm (Hauser & Worth)

This work takes its name from the 2003 Brittany Spears hit song “Toxic”.  Spears was arguably at the peak of her career back then, but shortly afterwards her life imploded with mental health issues engulfing her.  So are we looking at the aftermath of an explosion destroying a beautiful still life in the tradition of the Dutch masters?

Osamu Mori " 3MMM-Rivalry", Camphor laurel, (Geoff Harrison)

The human figure has been carved into a 120 year old camphor tree.  Traditionally, camphor has been employed for its aromatic scent as an embalming fluid, and thus this work could be seen as representing the healing powers of nature.

Jessica Murtagh, "Modern Relic IV, All In This Together, Apart", sandblasted & engraved glass (Geoff Harrison)

The NGV tells us that Murtagh draws inspiration from ancient Athenian ceramic amphoras known for their depiction of scenes from everyday life.  Here we see individuals wearing face masks queuing at a Centrelink office.

Glenn Brown "After Greuze"," After Rembrandt", "After De Gheyn II/Greuze", etching  (NGV)

The ancient art of printmaking as not been overlooked in this exhibition either.  Brown appropriates historical art in his paintings and sculptures and in recent years has extended his conceptual concerns to drawing and printmaking. 

Fernando Laposse, "Avocado Leather Cabinet", avocado skin & walnut (Geoff Harrison)

This is part of Laposse’s Conflict  Avocado series where he exposes the devastating impact the corrupt and violent avocado industry is having on forest ecosystems in Mexico, and on the lives of those who depend on it.

The Community of Maningrida, Arnhem Land, "Maningrida Fish Fence", Pandanus & natural dyes (Geoff Harrison)

The tradition of weaving goes back a long time in the community of Maningrida.  The Burarra women of Maningrida use natural materials such as pandanus leaves, kurrajong and various bark fibres to produce their work.

Azuma Makoto, "Block Flowers", flowers in resin, (Geoff Harrison)

130 of these boxes have been mounted around a digital video piece titled “Drop Time” depicting the life cycle of flowers in hyper speed.  “A mark of celebration and sorrow, flowers have historically been used to acknowledge life, death and the passing of time”.

"Megacities Project", 10 photographers’ images across 19 suspended screens (Geoff Harrison)

This work was commissioned by the NGV where leading photographers were engaged to capture the environment of 10 mega cities - defined as having more than 10 million inhabitants.  In the 1950’s there were only 2 of them, by 2022 there were more than 30 - with half of them to be found in Asia. 

Any gripes?  A few including the paintings of Prudence Flint which leave me cold; the Yoko Ono installation “My Mommy Is Beautiful” has taken well over a decade to get here and we’ve definitely been short-changed on the work of artist/prankster Maurizio Cattelan.  His banana taped to a wall is hardly the highlight of his career.  I would have much preferred his fully-functioning 18 karat gold toilet titled “America”. 

Many of the works in this exhibition were commissioned by the NGV and will join the gallery’s permanent collection.  Overall, I’m inclined to give this exhibition the thumbs up - as per the sculpture outside the gallery entrance.

References;

National Gallery of Victoria

Artshub

Hauser & Worth

Australian Design Review

Robert Hughes' Strange Memoir

This would have to be one of the strangest books I’ve ever read, which might explain why I couldn’t find it on the inter library loan system.  The strangeness is highlighted by the fact that the story ends in 1970 when Hughes jets off to the US to become art critic for Time Magazine.  One would have thought that 513 pages would have been sufficient to cover his entire life, rich and varied as it was, but no.  Perhaps there was meant to be a second edition, although he completed this one six years before his death.

Robert Hughes (The Guardian)

Those who remember the Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes (1938 - 2012) will recognize the irony in the title “Robert Hughes - Things I Didn’t Know”. He was known for his forthright, even rambunctious views on just about everything.  But the book begins with a harrowing account of his near fatal car crash in the north of Western Australia in 1999.  It seems we had a different Robert Hughes, physically and in other respects after that episode. 

He had a Catholic upbringing and was educated at a strict Jesuit boarding school. For mine, he banters on for far too long about his early life.  His distant father whom he clearly idolised was a World War One fighter pilot and later became a solicitor before dying when Robert was only 12.  Hughes was the youngest of four by far and his father’s death affected him greatly.  Although he rambles on and on about his father’s wartime experiences, Hughes does come up with some interesting anecdotes.  Such as Allied high command’s point blank refusal to issue its pilots with parachutes, for the dubious reason that such safety devices would reduce the fighting spirit of the pilots and give them an easy way out.  “This appalling callousness condemned many pilots to be roasted alive, thousands of feet in the air, as their stricken little planes spiraled helplessly to earth…”  Apparently, some pilots chose to simply bail out without parachutes - who could blame them.

Riverview St Ignatius College, Sydney

The eloquence of Hughes’ writing is evident in his summation of the futility of WW1 and the contrast to the objectives of WW2.  “Hitler had to be stopped, and  his defeat did save the human race from unimaginably worse  slaughters.  No such historical necessity excused the deaths of millions of boys in 1914-18.  Because of the killing by a Serbian terrorist of an Austrian archduke whose life wasn’t worth a jackeroo’s finger, because of the ineptitude of Europe’s civil and military leaders and the indifference of old men (including British Prime Minister Lloyd George - I believe) to the fate of the young, they were sucked into the immense vortex of the most vilely useless mass conflict in modern history…” 

Hughes found life in the Jesuit boarding school, Riverview in Sydney, repressive and beatings were common.  However he heaps great praise on Father Wallace who was the headmaster and who allowed Hughes access to books that were outside the limited curriculum of the college.  Father Wallace paved the way to Hughes becoming a fully articulate writer.

As Hughes tells the story, he attained the role of art critic almost by accident.  His predecessor at The Observer in Sydney was sacked after being critical of an exhibition which, as it turned out, he hadn’t seen.  Hughes was an illustrator for the magazine and that was good enough for the editor, the celebrated social commentator Donald Horne.  But as Hughes explained, there was very little art in Australia in the late 1950’s and early ‘60s to be critiquing.  He also briefly wrote criticism for, and contributed cartoons to The Mirror, until Rupert Murdoch took it over and slashed his wages.

Ian Fairweather on Bribie Island c 1966 (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

One of his more amusing anecdotes involved a trip with the artist Jon Molvig to visit the “sage of Bribie Island”, Ian Fairweather.  The trip was hair raising enough due to Molvig’s heavy drinking, but upon arrival they discovered Fairweather in a disheveled state, his front teeth were missing, one foot was wrapped in rags after he’d been bitten by a goanna and he was living in leaky Balinese huts.  It was obvious to Hughes and Molvig that the foot was gangrenous and they had to almost drag him to the mainland for treatment. 

So appalled was Fairweather’s Sydney dealer with the state of his paintings, she sent him a roll of the finest Belgian flax canvas which would have cost a fortune.  Fairweather used the canvas to plug holes in his hut and went on painting on damp cardboard with house paint.

Hughes never felt comfortable in the Australia of his youth.  He disliked the bush and the beach - inside a house, or even better a cafe seemed to be his natural habitat.  Eventually he realised that he had to head off overseas.   He left for Europe in 1964. 

Thanks to contacts he developed with the likes of renowned Australian author Alan Moorehead and art historian Herbert Read, Hughes began his writing career.  He is particularly indebted to Moorehead, having spent some time living with him and his wife in Italy.  He writes at great length about the impact Italian culture had on him (particularly the gardens of Bomarzo), which he was able to enjoy before these sites were “wrecked” by tourism.  But he believes that his years in central Italy, being exposed to great religious art, had transformed him from a guilt ridden, young ex-catholic who was haunted by the critical gaze of strongly catholic family into a relatively guilt free agnostic - more at ease with the world. 

So he left for London and soon found work there, contributing to the Sunday Times and later the Sunday Telegraph.  He was scathing of the youth underground of the sixties in London which he claimed was based on spontaneous  hedonism, the joy of marijuana, spontaneous and uncommitted sex, and culturally illiterate, ignorant of most things older than itself.  And it was within this milieu that Hughes met his future wife, Danne Emerson.

Danne Emerson (xwhos.com)

The marriage was a disaster.  Emerson was also an expat Australian with a Catholic upbringing. Shortly after the birth of their son Danton, Danne announced that she was going to ‘find her own fucks’ and suggested the Hughes do the same.  “If there was ever a misalliance between two emotionally hypercharged and wolfishly immature people. It was our marriage.  I was as unsuited to her as she was to me.  I could no more fulfull or even predict her needs than she could mine.” 

He blames his Catholic upbringing for lacking the courage to end the marriage, at least until 1981.  He said it was like being trapped in the hull of an upturned boat, running out of oxygen yet lacking the courage to dive deeper and escape to the surface.  He claims she contracted the clap from Jimi Hendrix before passing it on to him.  But Hughes’ own track record wasn’t spotless and this was another reason for his reluctance to file for divorce - fear that Danton might become a ward of the courts. 

He is scathing of Brett Whiteley who, he suspected, introduced Danne to harder drugs which was the final nail in the marriage coffin.  He found a drug-free Whiteley to be delightful company but “The shame of addiction…is apt to make junkies into missionaries.  They like, and need, to drag others down with them.  Such aggression compensates for their own weakness and dependency with drugs.” 

Hughes describes Whiteley as a cultural mascot for the semi-cultivated, a disciple (supposedly) of Zen Buddhism who overdosed in a lonely motel room south of Sydney.  Danton died by suicide in 2001 with Hughes once claiming that they hardly knew one another.  Danne died in 2003 from a brain tumor.

The Interior of the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence (The Guardian)

One of the most significant experiences of Hughes’ life was when he reported on the devastating Florence floods of November 1966 for BBC2.  The flood laid waste to much of the rich cultural heritage of Florence and imbued in Hughes an even greater reverence for art of the past and an antipathy for those of the avant-garde who regard the past as repressive and a dead weight that ‘new’ art had to shake off.  He acknowledges that culture does change but the idea that it can reinvent itself, like a snake shedding its skin is naïve.  He is regarded by some as a cultural conservative. 

Perhaps it was his enquiring, encyclopedic mind that prevented Hughes from reigning in his story to one volume, but it’s worth a read nevertheless.

Goya - A Journey Into Darkness

It all seemed to be going swimmingly for Francisco Goya – until his nervous breakdown in 1792.  After that, he is credited with tearing up the rule book and reinventing what art can and should do and what it means to be human. 

He had been court painter to the Spanish royal family, who admired the rococo tapestries he had designed for the royal court in Madrid.  So they invited Goya to paint their portraits, and in the great tradition of telling it like it is, he did just that.  The result was a display of royal mockery never seen before in the history of art.  And yet, somehow he got away with it.  Flattery was not to be found on Goya’s CV.

The Parasol, a tapestry design painted by Goya, c1777

But the evil and the stupidity he saw in the world around him soon came to the surface in his art.  The catalyst for this was the nervous breakdown and physical illness that he suffered in the early 1790’s.  The exact nature of Goya’s illness has never been properly diagnosed but it left him functionally deaf and in fear of his own sanity.  Suddenly the light has gone out in his art and darkness has crept in as he explored the depths of his own imagination.

An example is “St Francis Borgia Attending a Dying Impenitent” of 1795.  From the saint's crucifix spurt drops of blood that land on the sinner's torso.  This painting is thought to represent Goya’s growing disillusionment with Christianity and its inability to explain the inhumanity in the world.

St Francis Borgia Attending a Dying Penitent, 1795, oil on canvas

In 1794, Goya painted the “Casa De Locos (The Madhouse)”, a stone gaol where all manner of appalling acts are being witnessed.  It is thought that these works represented, at least in part, all of Goya’s disappointments with the world around him.

Casa De Locos (The Madhouse). 1794, oil on panel

Around 1794, Goya painted “Yard With Lunatics”.  “The work stands as a horrifying and imaginary vision of loneliness, fear and social alienation, a departure from the rather more superficial treatment of mental illness in the works of earlier artists such as Hogarth.” Wikipedia

From commissioned portraitist, Goya had made the remarkable transformation into an artist exploring his own bleak view of the world. He claimed the painting is based on something he witnessed in Zaragoza where a yard was filled with lunatics, and two of them were fighting completely naked while their warder beats them.

Yard With Lunatics, 1794, oil on tinplate

In his book “Goya”, written shortly after his near death experience on a highway near Broome, Western Australia, author Robert Hughes discusses the profound isolation that engulfed Goya as a result of his deafness.  “Any trauma makes you think of worse trauma.  It sets the mind worrying and fantasizing about what else might be in store, and whether you can bear it if it comes.”  And with Goya’s illness not being properly diagnosed, he had no idea if the illness was temporary or permanent and what impact it would have on his career.  And all this was exacerbated by his increasing deafness.

Self Portrait, c.1815, oil on canvas

Hughes tells us that the eighteenth century was the heyday of the prison as isolator, long before the concept of prison as a reformatory was to creep into minds of European governments.  Whilst madhouses were even worse because no one had any idea of how to treat the mad, so they were simply dumping grounds for the psychotic, the deranged and the wayward.  No doubt, this fed into Goya’s exploration of the dark side of human existence.

What was to follow of course, was his famous Caprichos, his disasters of war series (inspired by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain) and the black paintings of his final years.  Interestingly, Spain went into a coma (artistically speaking) for over 50 years following Goya’s death in 1828.  Perhaps his successors were intimidated by the sheer power and darkness of his vision.

References;

Rococo  -  BBC TV

Something Wicked This Way Comes -  The Independent

Wikipedia

Art In Tough Economic Times

The Morrison Government’s recent decision to roll the Department of Communication and the Arts into a new super Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications has drawn widespread condemnation from the arts community.  For a start, there is no mention of the arts in this new super department.  There is no reference to its arts responsibilities at all.

The arts haven’t always been treated with such callous disregard during tough economic times.  We only have to look back to what happened during the great depression in the United States to find a more enlightened attitude.

The Works Progress Administration was established by Franklin D Roosevelt shortly after he was elected US President in 1932.  It was part of his New Deal which involved massive programs to provide employment for the millions who were out of work.  The WPA provided programs to struggling writers and artists. 

Artists were commissioned to paint murals in post offices, town halls and railroad stations across the country.  And whilst this may have produced a lot of idealized kitsch, it did keep a lot of artists alive.  One such artist was Jack Levine. “Prior to the depression, many American artists were traveling to the left bank in Paris and were enjoying this hedonistic lifestyle until the money ran out, then they all returned to the US.  Many artists became very political and I became politicized out of my own poverty.  I didn’t have a dime.  I became very bitter and nobody wanted my work, so I went on the New Deal for a while and it felt as if someone had thrown me a life saver.”

Another WPA artist was Vincent Campanella “artists were able to see themselves as part of the working class and they saw themselves as free to be what they wanted to be under the WPA, painters who were free to paint the common life.  They were free to share opinions, share thoughts, share peoples financial difficulties, freedom to dedicate yourself and say I am a painter who is a human being and my fellow human beings are my subjects.”

Campanella’s portrait of Thomas Hart Benton

Corporations also encouraged public art at this time.  New York’s Rockefeller Centre is full of it.  There is a sample of it on the Associated Press Building by Isamu Noguchi. 

Isamu Noguchi

The famous photographer Lewis Hine worked as chief photographer for the WPA’s National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment.  During the depression he produced images of “worker as hero” to use Robert Hughes’ terminology including images of construction workers on the Empire State Building.

Lewis Hine Construction workers on the Empire State Building

Contrast all this to the Morrison Government’s attitude to the arts. The government denies that the arts has been downgraded by this decision, but the outgoing Secretary of the Departments of Communications and the Arts, Mike Mrdak disagrees.  In an email sent to his staff on the day the new super department was announced, Mrdak (pictured below) made his feelings plain.  "We were not permitted any opportunity to provide advice on the machinery of government changes, nor were our views ever sought on any proposal to abolish the department or to changes to our structure and operations."

Many bureaucrats are concerned a departmental secretary managing the competing demands of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications may never prioritise a Cabinet submission from Arts.

Needless to say this move by the Morrison Government has been labelled philistine, and it ignores recent studies showing the link between involvement in the arts and good mental health.  But to me, the argument goes beyond this.  It ignores the many thousands involved in the manufacture of artist’s materials, and their retailers.  And then there are the thousands of galleries across the country and their staff they employ, the performing arts, theatres and writers.  It’s an entire creative industry potentially being trashed by a government fixated on mining and infrastructure.  A 2017 report from the Department of Communications and the Arts stated that the “creative industries” contributed 6.4% to the nations GDP.

But what else would you expect from a third rate advertising man who got kicked out of Tourism Australia.  So we made him Prime Minister instead.

REFERENCES

ABC News Online

“American Visions”, Robert Hughes, ABC TV

“Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art, Made In The USA” , Waldemar Januszczak

Let There Be Coloured Light - Dan Flavin

It was more than a coincidence that a nation that gave us Donald Judd could also produce the artist Dan Flavin.  In fact, the two met in 1962 at a gathering in a Brooklyn apartment organised to discuss the possibility of a cooperative artist-run gallery.  Their friendship developed and the two became known as “Flavin and Judd” for a while, indeed Judd named his son Flavin Starbuck Judd.

Untitled 1970

Many of Flavin’s installations were site-specific, such as the one above.  In the December 1965 issue of Artforum, Flavin wrote “I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctions in the room’s composition.”

In the final episode of his 1996 series “American Visions”, critic Robert Hughes referred to the age of anxiety in modern America, fed by the cold war and the general disillusionment with government following the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War.  He visited the Judd ‘shrine’ in Marfa, Texas to illustrate his point, but he could equally have visited a Flavin installation for while the play of coloured light could be construed as beautiful, there is an anxiousness with his vast empty scenes.

Untitled (for Ksenija) 1994

Flavin was born in New York in 1933.  He became a Catholic altar boy and trained to be a priest.  He recalled being ''curiously fond of the solemn high funeral Mass, which was so consummately rich in candlelight, music, chant, vestments, processions and incense.''  This, no doubt, became a major influence on his work as an artist.  He is described as a minimalist sculptor and is considered to be the first artist to employ electric light in a sustained way.

Installation at Menil’s Richmond Hall 1996

An article in the New York Times describes Flavin’s art as “brazenly radical and very much in the vein of Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades”, but apart from the use of manufactured materials, I don’t see any correlation at all.  But then the article goes on to describe Flavin’s installations as having an “ecstatic beauty that was at once painterly and architectural”.

Flavin became adept at combining the intense lines of colour of the light tube with their softer diffuse glow and the geometric arrangements of the tubes.  In 1971, he illuminated the entire rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, but he was just as successful illuminating a corner as below.

It was very daring of Flavin to move sculpture away from the figurative to the impersonal use of industrial materials.  In 1989, he extended his range by illuminating the exterior of the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden, Germany.  Works such as these have been described as symphonic.  I often wonder if he had an influence on artists such as Olafur Eliasson and Kimsooja who I covered in earlier blogs.

Flavin arrived at the idea of using fluorescent tubes after several years of painting and drawing in the abstract expressionistic manner.  These were followed by a brief period in the late 1950's and early 60's of making boxy wall reliefs in strong monochromatic colours, to which he attached coloured light bulbs and fluorescent tubes.

According to the PBS program The Art Assignment, minimalist sculptors decided to abandon the pedestal to dismantle the separation between the viewer and the art.  Judd argued these works were neither painting nor sculpture but specific objects occupying space that didn’t necessarily reference anything.   And it’s worth noting that the artists themselves hated the term minimalism.

Work such as Flavin’s contains no secret, no hidden meaning, there is nothing to interpret.  It is what it is, and thus it was a complete break with the past where meaning may lie somewhere inside the object waiting to be unlocked.  Instead, the meaning lies in the viewer’s interaction with it, the context and the strong feelings it can evoke for presence, absence, space and light.  It is argued in the PBS program that in a world filled with complexity and information and “lots and lots of stuff”, minimalist art can be a balm.  I’m not about to argue.

Flavin died in 1996 from complications arising from diabetes.  

It’s now hibernation time for me, I’ll be back around mid January.

References;

The New York Times

PBS: The Art Assignment

Art Forum